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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading RIAA, others says CD ripping, backups not fair use (ARS Technica)ARS Technica looks into a triennial review of the DMCA by the content industry. "But supporting the status quo isn't in their interest. No, the idea is to embrace and extend. To wit, the joint reply also argues that making backups of your CDs is also not fair use. "The [submitted arguments in favor of granting exemptions to the DMCA] provide no arguments or legal authority that making back up copies of CDs is a noninfringing use. In addition, the submissions provide no evidence that access controls are currently preventing them from making back up copies of CDs or that they are likely to do so in the future. Myriad online downloading services are available and offer varying types of digital rights management alternatives. For example, the Apple FairPlay technology allows users to make a limited number of copies for personal use. Presumably, consumers concerned with the ability to make back up copies would choose to purchase music from a service that allowed such copying. Even if CDs do become damaged, replacements are readily available at affordable prices.""
New initiative aims to improve the quality of patents (NewsForge)NewsForge covers a quality over quantity initiative at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). "The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in looking for ways to improve the quality of the patents it issues, has turned to the biggest patent holder in the country, which also happens to be one of the biggest supporters of open source software (OSS). IBM's 2,941 patents from 2005 make it far and away the top patentee for the thirteenth consecutive year, but Big Blue -- with the help of the USPTO, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), Novell, Red Hat, and SourceForge -- is now aiming for quality over quantity, and is enlisting the OSS community to do it."
Trade Shows and Conferences Does Open Source Matter? To IT, It Does, Says Nicholas Carr (InformationWeek)InformationWeek covers the OSBC keynote of Nicholas Carr. ""We're in the early stages of a revolution in IT. We're entering a true utility era for IT" in which open source code, from the Apache Web Server, Linux operating system and other pieces of open source code working with them will form a commoditized base for most enterprise computing, he said in a keynote speech Tuesday at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Open source code "will fundamentally change the way software is bought and used in the IT world," he said. The exact shape of things to come is still hard to discern, but he predicted a commodity base of open-source software was likely to become available through large centralized suppliers." (Thanks to Peter Masiar.)
Historic Libre Graphics Meeting set for next month (NewsForge)Nathan Willis looks forward to the first Libre Graphics Meeting, on NewsForge. "LGM is free to attend and will be held at the university campus at La Doua, Villeurbanne, in Lyon, France. Speakers are scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Among them is the GIMP's Øyvind Kolås, who will present a talk on his implementation of the long-awaited Generic Graphical Library (GEGL) concept, Gggl. Marti Maria of LittleCMS will talk about color management, and adding it to graphics applications. Neil Howe, chief technology officer of Xara, will present an update on the company's work at opening the source of the Xara Extreme vector graphics editor and porting it to Linux."
Final FOSDEM interviewsThe final set of FOSDEM interviews has been published; they are: Jeff Waugh, Tomasz Kojm, Alex Russell, and Mark Spencer. "FOSDEM sounds like it would be a great chance to help spread the word about Asterisk. It is ironic, really, that Asterisk is *so* well known in the communications space (Network World was so kind as to name me among the '50 most powerful people in networking' this year) but yet in the Linux world it is surprisingly unknown."
The SCO Problem SCO Attacks Open Group (Groklaw)Groklaw has a new SCO filing which reveals the latest mutation of SCO's story: "Seeking to make Linux a viable, commercial-ready UNIX-on-Intel alternative, IBM misappropriated UNIX technology from SCO and provided that technology to The Open Group for purposes of The Open Group's 'Single UNIX Specification 2001' and The Open Group's efforts to work on 'UNIX Developer Guide -- Programming Interface'" Some of the Groklaw folks have had fun debunking this one. Also on Groklaw: IBM has gotten around to sending subpoenas to interesting companies like Sun, Microsoft, and Baystar.
Companies Jim Starkey joined MySQL ABJim Starkey is the original creator of InterBase which became Firebird. Here's blog entry at Firebird News in which he made it publicly known that he now works for MySQL AB. "My company, Netfrastructure, Inc., has been acquired by MySQL, AB. As part of the agreement, I will be working full time for MySQL." (Thanks to marius popa)
Oracle's open source buying spree (NewsForge)Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier covers the issue of large corporations controlling open-source projects. "When asked, MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says that the company's ambition is "a successful independent existence" and called Oracle's purchase of Sleepycat "a great validation of the power of open source. We have been predicting for a long time that the incumbent vendors will adopt open source in some form: by acquiring companies, by launching open source initiatives, and by opensourcing old closed source products. This is all in line with that." Not everyone is as sanguine about Oracle's buying spree as Mickos. PostgreSQL developer Josh Berkus has worried for years about the "perils of corporate-owned open source" and says that Oracle's acquisition of Sleepycat "is a perfect case in point.""
Does Oracle Understand What It's Buying? (Technocrat.net)Bruce Perens wonders if Oracle truly understands what it gets out of its open source acquisitions. "You can't really buy an Open Source project. The GPL was designed to make it possible for any Open Source participant to circumvent any other party who gets in the way. Other Open Source licenses are similar. Larry Ellison can buy business and influence over an Open Source project, but if he tries to have absolute control, Open Source developers will code elsewhere, replace whatever Larry holds close, and create new businesses."
Will major vendors dilute open source? (Network World)Network World looks at recent acquisitions of free software companies. "'I believe what will really determine the success or failure of commercial firms purchasing open source vendors is the extent to which they can keep the key developers,' says Barry Strasnick, CIO at CitiStreet, a benefits management company in Quincy, Mass. 'One of the main reasons that CitiStreet likes to deal with vendors such as JBoss is that our senior technical staff can deal with their technical staff, instead of having to deal with useless layers in between,' he says."
Linux Adoption South Korea plans 'Linux showcase city' (ZDNet UK)ZDNet UK reports that the South Korean government has plans to showcase the use of Linux, by paying for a city and a university to deploy the software on their servers and desktops. "The government believes the showcase city and university will encourage other organisations to migrate to open source software. "The test beds will prompt other cities and universities to follow suit through the showcasing of Linux as the major operating system without any technical glitches and security issues," said MIC director Lee Do-kyu, according to The Korea Times."
Linux taken for a ride in the Old West (ZDNet)ZDNet covers a migration to open source in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. "ZDNet UK spoke to Kent Morrison, the manager of information systems at Steamboat Springs, to find out more about the city's migration to open source. Morrison is responsible for two other members of staff in the town's IT department, which supports 160 networked workstations and approximately 220 email accounts across the town."
Linux at Work PCs for the poor: Which design will win? (ZDNet)ZDNet examines a number of technologies that are competing for the sub $100 PC space. "Only about 1 billion, or 16 percent of the 6.5 billion people living today, use the Internet, according to a running tally at Advanced Micro Devices. Designing machines that are resilient, powerful and cheap enough to reach those not yet online, though, has proven a lot tougher than expected. India's Simputer, an inexpensive handheld, flopped. Brazil has worked for years on a Linux PC for the poor, to no avail. "Initiatives of this sort need serious consideration from everyone. Developing nations need to start teaching about technology early in schools," said Luis Anavitarte, an analyst at Gartner. "But the reality kind of changes when we look at the costs and the functionality of these devices.""
Legal California takes up transparency, open source voting (NewsForge)NewsForge covers California State Senator Debra Bowen, who is overseeing hearings on whether the state should move toward using electronic voting systems that rely on open source software. "Open Voting Consortium President and CEO Alan Dechert is also focused on a more open, transparent vote, and backs not only Bowen and her bid for Calif. Secretary of State, but also state legislation to be introduced soon that requires disclosure of voting code and systems. Calif. Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg pushed legislation requiring consideration of open source software for electronic voting systems in 2004 as well."
Reports from the USPTO Meeting (Groklaw)Groklaw has posted a series of reports from the U.S. patent office meeting on prior art databases. From Bruce Perens's statement: "I respect that there are questions we've been asked to avoid, because this isn't the right forum. I'd just like to make sure that this activity is not confused as addressing the problems that software patenting presents for Open Source. It only deals with patent quality, and I hope that anyone reporting on this meeting understands that patent quality is a little piece of the overall problem for Open Source."
EU Council passes directive on data retention (Heise)Heise reports that the European Union data retention directive has passed its last hurdle. "At their meeting in Brussels on Tuesday, the Ministers of Justice and Home Secretaries of the EU have paved the way for the retention of telephone and Internet data without grounds for suspicion. Without any further discussion, they approved a directive already passed last December with votes from the main people's parties in the EU Parliament. This directive makes it mandatory for telecommunications providers to retain data from the last six to 24 months for some 450 million EU citizens."
Resources Asterisk on OpenWrt (NewsForge)Joe Barr is running Asterisk on OpenWrt. "I installed Asterisk on OpenWrt White Russian RC4 on a Linksys WRT54GS wireless router. It's my first Asterisk installation. I admit that I scraped the knuckles on both hands getting Asterisk correctly configured, but now that I've done it, I would say it was worth all the frustrations it caused me. Not only do I now have a functional personal PBX, I've also learned a little about the black art of telephony along the way."
February GNOME JournalThe February 2006 GNOME Journal has been posted. Topics covered include GStreamer 1.10, Cairo, GNOME marketing, and an interview with Jeff Waugh. "There are no killer apps. I am quite serious about that. If we look at the kinds of things we describe as 'killer apps', they're almost always killer network effects. Look at the success of LAMP - which is the killer app? Is it Linux, Apache, one of the Free databases, or one of the Free languages that rocks for web stuff? None of them."
Building a High-Availability MySQL Cluster (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at building a high-availability MySQL cluster. "When building highly available clusters, people often choose one extra physical machine per service, creating an A-B, fail-over schema. With static websites, there is no problem making the application highly available; you can just store the data in two places. However, the moment you add a database to your environment, things start to become more difficult. The easy way out is to move the database to a different machine and move that server into a SEP field."
Preventing SSH Dictionary Attacks With DenyHosts (HowtoForge)HowtoForge prevents SSH dictionary attacks with DenyHosts. "In this HowTo I will show how to install and configure DenyHosts. DenyHosts is a tool that observes login attempts to SSH, and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address, DenyHosts blocks further login attempts from that IP address by putting it into /etc/hosts.deny. DenyHosts can be run by cron or as a daemon. In this tutorial I will run DenyHosts as a daemon."
Reviews Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com)Linux.com has posted a glowing review of Banshee. "Banshee is perfect for managing your entire music collection, and particularly items stored on iPod music players. The software allows you to carry out many tasks in ways similar to Apple's iTunes, including playing music directly from the device and creating playlists with your songs. Banshee supports a wide variety of codecs, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and MP3. The player read ID3 tags perfectly for my music collection, and sorting through the tracks -- comprising several file formats -- was incredibly easy."
Must-have Firefox and Thunderbird extensions (NewsForge)Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier reviews several firefox and thunderbird extensions on NewsForge. "The Quicktext extension comes in handy for anyone who needs to send out form letters or canned responses via email. This extension lets you define templates that you can insert into an email message from a menu, or (even better) using hotkey combinations. Templates can be simple or very complex."
PalmSource releases Linux platform for smartphone (Mobilisled)Mobilisled looks at the Access Linux Platform (ALP) from PalmSource, a Linux platform for mobile phones. "Major components include a standard, commercial-grade Linux kernel, an optimised implementation of GIMP ToolKit , GStreamer -- an open source, modular and multi-threaded streaming media framework and the SQLite embedded database engine. The company is also adding in a few extras of its own, including the NetFront browser, PalmSource messaging and telephony middleware, the PalmSource mobile applications including PIMs, multimedia, messaging and HotSync capabilities along with Palm Desktop."
Miscellaneous KDE 4 developers look toward new desktop possibilities (NewsForge)Stephen Feller discusses the changes coming to KDE 4 in a NewsForge article. "Developers on the projects expected to make up the next major version of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) want KDE 4 to offer features and software interaction beyond what is available now, and better, easier access for users to their files and information. Among the ideas are universally available personal information and a desktop that is tailored for and responds to the things users do most. Ian Geiser, a KDE developer and official US representative for the KDE project, says KDE 4 will most likely be released in late 2006, though internal debate could push the release back to early 2007. Developer Till Adam says developers are still trying to figure out the combined vision for KDE 4, and how everything fits together."
KDE and GNOME collaborating on free desktop promotion (NewsForge)NewsForge takes a look at collaboration between desktops. "KDE and GNOME undeniably occupy a very small share of the desktop market. If GNOME took 20% of that share from KDE, it'd make a marginal gain. But if KDE and GNOME together took a 10% of the desktop market by 2010 (a stated goal of the GNOME marketing project), they'd both gain a massive amount."
Linux is running on ...Linux-Watch reports that Edgar 'Gimli' Hucek has gotten Gentoo Linux running on a Mactel. Also ZDNet reports that Dave Miller is running Linux on Sun's new UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based server. Neither is running perfectly yet. "The boot didn't go entirely swimmingly, however: Later in the process, the file system caused a serious problem called a kernel panic."
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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